If you were psychic you could provide the info I want. Otherwise do as you been doing. You got enough to do. Everybody has different opinions and feelings about everything. We all love ya , we just have strange ways of expressing it sometimes.
It’s all good.
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The suggestion that you would withdraw communications in response to criticism is childish and condescending. Have you considered that your communication failures arise from content, not frequency? Poor communication is poor communication, whether frequent or infrequent. If you actually want to fix this and not just blame customers for your failures, I suggest you take inspiration from Pine64’s monthly updates.
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Well I hope you guys can knock it out faster.
Why aren’t you making larger orders to fulfill every order you have? I thought Evergreen was your last batch? Are you guys still worried the phone has too many hardware bugs?
Thanks
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Evergreen is the last batch, but there could still be manufacturing defects that Purism doesn’t have control over which would need to be brought to the manufacturer’s attention.
Maybe a misunderstanding of batch in this case. Evergreen is the name of the development level/version, and it’s still taking orders, growing. Within it there seems to be manufacturing batches (at least: for the early backers, backers, L5-USA variant, later orders,…). There was a blog post about what limits the size of manufacturing batches (getting parts, which are limited atm).
I think there are several distinct points:
- Possible future bottleneck of missing components (CPUs)
- Fine tuning the shipment process. Some actual examples
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- make sure the WiFi works always and not by a 50% chance because the clock is set wrong
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- fix the problem of dust under the screen protector
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- maybe listen to feedback that Australians get the wrong AC plug
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- fine tuning of the actual shipment procedere, see following
- Factual bottleneck of Purism employess having to
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- coordinate with customers
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- assemble the hardware
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- flash software
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- QA
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- package
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- send
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In the blog post we discuss that the manufacturing runs sizes are based on our shipping throughput. We try to size them a bit above the amount we feel we can ship in a particular span of time. As mentioned in the blog post, now that we have more accurate shipping throughput measurements compared to pre-Evergreen for larger numbers of phones, we are increasing batch sizes accordingly.
Separately, we mentioned the potential for CPU supply chain issues down the road, but up to this point we’ve been able to source the CPUs we’ve needed and it hasn’t resulted in any delays yet.
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What is “shipping throughput” ? Manufacture as many phones as you have orders for and ship them. At least the phones are made and all the little bumps in the road can be dealt with as shipping moves along. Wait for supply chain delays/shortages and then you can’t even fill the current orders. Then people get agitated on the forum. Keep it as simple as you can.
They are using a just-in-time manufacturing/shipping process. If they order all the parts they need for all outstanding orders now, then they have to store all of them now (well, whenever they all arrive at once). Given the protective packaging, the size of the team, and the probable size of the facility, that could very well leave them with nearly no space to actually do the assembly. Also, while it would avoid shortages (at the cost of not catching new manufacturing defects as NXP is still refining their process), it wouldn’t increase the rate of delivery, as the human assembly-time is the limiting factor.
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Haters gonna hate, cranks gonna be cranky, tin foil hatters gonna wear tin foil. Please don’t publish less information because some people have negative reactions regardless of what you do.
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Do you work at Purism? Phone is manufactored in China and then shipped to them. Then they install the modem and ship it to us.
They handle laptops , desktops , servers , etc. I think they have an open closet or two to spare for storage.
Final product is being shipped . Earlier “batches” were not final product.
And they are going to sell any phones they have “left over” so that is not an issue.
Anything else is pure speculation and opinion. I accept this reality. Don’t need reassurances and comforting . That will come when my L5 arrives.
Cheers
If it were that simple they’d be done already. The soldered components come pre-attached. This means the CPU SOC is already on the mainboard, as are the screen, audio, and USB controllers, the memory, the storage, and so on. Likewise, the modem arrives already attached to its package. That is the extent of the pre-assembly. True, putting the components together should only take roughly half the time of the teardown video, except for inspecting them for defects before assembly, and then whatever integration testing they do. Depending on the fitment of the case and other plastic components, there may still be some time spent trimming and shimming too.
Anyway, it’s probably not the physical assembly that’s the limiting factor. New products should have a burn-in period where defective devices are forced to fail-hard. This usually requires attaching them to some sort of diagnostic system, and for Li-* batteries, putting them under a thermal camera while you charge/discharge them and exercise the various components. How long of a burn-in test is needed depends on the device, but figure an hour at minimum. You can run them in parallel, but it still takes time to set them up, and depending on the test rig used, might have limited capacity (which I would expect them to expand enough to meet future demand, but expanding much past that point would be wasteful).
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So from what you say , everything is on/in the phone but the modem? Wouldn’t some of that testing have been done on the earlier batch? How many changes since then?
There seems to be so much to do. It’s a miracle this is even happening.
I can’t wait till I get my L5. That is going to be really something cool.
No, that’s what you say. He counted what stuff is on the PCB.
There are still quite a few parts to assemble (casing, display, battery, PCB A, PCB B, modem, WIFI, camera, antennae, switches …)
Have a look at the old assembly line pictures. https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Hardware/Librem-5-Gallery
He’s not talking about testing for design flaws, but of flawed components. Sub-standard goods that hopefully fail during a short test on premise, rather than a few minutes after you unbox it.
(Many years ago I think I read about a report by Google on the lifetime of their quadrillions of HDDs in their search engine servers. They either died in the first few months or after many years).
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Boy reality really sucks sometimes
That is the case with most components. Tiny manufacturing (not design) flaws can cause electron leakage, bad RF interaction, or in the case of mechanical drives, tiny vibrations; flaws which are too small to detect even with computer-assisted examination, but which will cause the device to fail quite quickly. On larger, integrated components, you can add things like cold solder joints from the wrong door left open near a pick-and-place machine or random other things which the factory should have caught (but it’s the job of the SI to verify everything).
Any system I ship to anyone gets a minimum 6 hour burn-in test for that very reason. Anything which survives 6 hours of full load generally lasts at least 2 years (and usually longer if it’s not badly abused).
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From my point of view continuous updates are key on satisfying a late/unfinished project. Just look at Star Citizen. What might be evaluated is the content of the communication and where to put the energy of reviewing and creating posts.
Besides I also think that the discussion culture in this forum needs to be improved by all sides. I sometimes get the impression that some try to divide people into haters and fanboys and everybody including purism employees feels offended. There are points to criticize and there has been a lot achieved - both should be possible to communicate (in a respectful way). If that’s not possible and the way out would be stopping to communicate (which reads kind of like a threat to me “the jury is still out” “not […] enough to change […] yet” - no offense) I expect this project to suffer from it.
And don’t get me wrong: Speculating over if someone ran out of money is no criticism - but at least that’s a speculation point I have not seen for a long time.
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I wonder whether the storage comes pre-loaded with the software or someone has to restore it on. I would assume pre-loaded - but that then comes with its own challenges because there may be benefits in updating that software from time to time.
Then there is the question of how they fix the time. Boot up once and just fix it? Or?
Then there is marrying up the phone order with the accessories order, if there was one e.g. order spare battery / extra modem model / smartcard / uSD card / …
The feedback was: warn customers in the affected countries at the time of the modem selection email that they will have to go out and procure a suitable AC plug adapter.
That way the plug adapter may well be available before the phone is. I wasn’t expecting any bill of materials / assembly changes, realistically.
Whatever we armchair assemblers can come up with, you can bet it’s 50%-100% more hassle than that. 
I would assume they are flashing the OS image in-house. First because of the hassle of keeping the PCB manufacturer updated with the latest OS image. Second because of the security implications. The only way to know what’s on the storage chip is to write it full yourself.
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